Chapter 50 Ahab's Boat and Crew. Fedallah

Stubb and Flask are discussing
the matter of Ahab's whaleboat and the question of whether a one-legged captain should even be in a whaleboat during the hunt.
Flask is pro, while Stubb is con. It was a much debated question
at the time -- whether a captain, who is of paramount importance
to the success of the voyage, should risk his life in a
whaleboat. With Ahab in his maimed condition, it was certain
that the owners of the Pequod would be dead set against it.
But this was not a question of an occasional presence in
one of the mate's whaleboats; unbeknownst to the owners, Ahab
had stealthily brought a stowaway whaleboat crew of five on
board; and Ahab had surreptitiously had a spare whaleboat fitted
out with an extra layer of flooring to support his ivory-pointed
peg leg. The owners would not have stood for a special boat and
extra crew with Ahab as boatheader, and it was not without good
cause that Ahab was worried about being accused of
usurpation.

Although the yellow-skinned
Parsee sailors were weird and queer, they
blended in with the Pequod's motley crew soon enough. Besides,
whaleships were always picking up queer castaway creatures found
tossing about in the open sea, so that Beelzebub [the devil]
himself might one day climb up the side and down into the cabin
to chat with the captain, and it would excite no particular
notice in the forecastle.

"Not so their emir, Fedallah
-- a muffled mystery to the last. Whence he came; by what sort
of unaccountable tie he soon evinced himself to be linked with
Ahab's peculiar fortunes; what sort of influence, or
authority even, he projected over Ahab -- Heaven knows.
All this none knew.

"Fedallah was a creature such
as civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone only see in
their dreams, and then but dimly. The likes of him glide among
the Oriental isles -- those insulated, immemorial lands, which
even in modern days preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness
of earth's primal generations. There all men eye each other as
real phantoms and ask the sun and the moon why they were created
and to what end. There, according to scriptures, angels indeed
consorted with the daughters of men -- and devils also
indulged in mundane amours."

And so, in the character of Captain
Ahab, we have the American Faust; a Nantucket Quaker
whaleman who appears to have SOLD HIS SOUL TO THE DEVIL in return
for revenge on Moby Dick. [The Oxford Companion to
English Literature cites Moby-Dick as an
outstanding example of a "memoir-novel" (a work of fiction that
purports to be true autobiographical history). More importantly,
the editor of that reference volume cites Moby-Dick as
"the closest approach the United States has had to a national
prose epic".] This work of American fiction is so many
things to so many people, that it is safe to say that it
qualifies as timeless, relevant, world-class
literature.